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A far-right protestor wears a MAGA tophat with a grim expression.

Conservative Evangelicals Aren’t Hypocrites, They’re Sadists

By Daniel Schultz

…an imperfect instrument of God’s work to maintain the sacred order of the world. The cruelty is indeed the point because the cruelty manifests the justice that maintains the proper order. So how do you counteract all of this? Arguments from reason don’t work—they’re working from a different mental model. Arguments from values don’t work—they don’t share the same values, or at least not in the same way. Arguments from identity don’t work—they don’…

Doubting Obama: A Response to Harper’s and Simon Critchley

By Linell Cady

…the battle for economic and social justice, or otherwise retreat from the world that I knew and loved.” The politics of religion in American life have allowed the religious right to “own” religion, and the media has played along with this narrative for the past two decades. Deeply critical of the “strategies of avoidance” among progressives regarding religion—which has allowed conservatives to define religion publically—Obama offers a different t…

The Potentially Explosive Russian Church Intrigue Revealed by Mueller Investigation

By Katherine Kelaidis

…of its former imperial role as a servant of the State. And in a time of renewed Russian confidence and aggression abroad, the Russian Orthodox Church has become an important instrument of state power. This is a development with dangerous implications, not only for for the global Orthodox Church, but for human rights and political freedom around the world. It appears that most of the correspondences in the recent breach were related to efforts by…

Why Evolution Should Be Taught in Church

By Paul Wallace

…th and between the words on the page. The “book of nature,” as the natural world is sometimes called, is no different. Beauty in nature begins at the surfaces but compounds rapidly beneath. All scientists know this. Keeping this beauty and wonder and mystery from those who come to church in search of God is simply unfair. By keeping the best of modern science out of the church, a disservice is done not only to those who come looking for God, but t…

Zeitgeist A Blend Of Skepticism, Metaphysical Spirituality, and Conspiracy

By Michael J. Altman

…ri Chinmoy Ghose: “When the Power of love overcomes the love of power, the world will know peace.” Trungpa Rinpoche, Ram Das, and Ghose provide a dose of spiritual humanism that bookends a film filled with conspiracy narratives of corruption and manipulation. Christianity, religion, war, economies; these are all meant to divide and conquer humanity, the film argues, and the solution to the suffering they cause lies in a metaphysical vision of univ…

God Dissolves into the Occupy Movement

By Nathan Schneider

…momentum of a much-needed counterweight to the 1%. Nathan, you’ve been in New York covering Occupy Wall Street from the beginning, during which time a group called Protest Chaplains has been on the scene; religious groups showed up for the big march on October 6; and the following day’s Kol Nidre service was held in Zuccotti Park and has since developed into Occupy Judaism, which describes itself as “Radical Jewish Direct Action in support of Occ…

Books to Give this Holiday Season to Help Understand the World We’ve Found Ourselves in (and to Help Reimagine a Better One)

By Becky Garrison

…for National Policy, whose membership list reads like a who’s who in the Trump administration. Shameless: A Sexual Reformation (Convergent Books) by Nadia Bolz-Weber For that holy hipster friend in search of a new kind of a/theistic Christianity who doesn’t want to go back and read the works of Phyllis Trible, John Boswell, Elisabeth Schüssler Fiorenza, bell hooks, and other pioneering scholars who’ve written on the intersection of human sexualit…

What Happens When We Use Horror Movies to Interpret the Real World? 10 Questions for the Authors of ‘The Exorcist Effect’

By Eric Harrelson and Joseph P. Laycock

…er reportedly lost control of the vehicle and ran down an embankment. The truck rolled several times before coming to a stop just before a sharp 25-foot drop. The driver luckily escaped with only a few broken fingers and some 13 stitches. He reported seeing a large black dog with glowing red eyes standing in the road and swerved to avoid hitting it. A curse may explain why this book took nearly five years to write and why our research trip to Conn…

A Long History of Blaming the Jews

By Gordon Haber

…ism represented “a state of pure submission to the demands of the material world, and measured humanity’s progress toward truth in terms of its distance from that state” (an idea that strongly echoes the “flesh versus spirit” dichotomy of Paul). But Hegel believed that Kant had fallen prey to “the Jewish principle of opposing thought to reality, reason to sense”—in effect, Judaizing. Schopenhauer was the most blatant in his conflation of Judaism a…

Magic In the Daylight

By Brook Wilensky-Lanford

…ing character in the film, gets to be the mouthpiece for its message: “The world may or may not be a world of purpose, but it does contain a little bit of magic.” I know it’s just a romantic comedy, but I couldn’t help being a little disappointed. I guess I just don’t see what purpose and magic have to do with one another. If Sophie could really contact an unseen world of souls of the dead, it would certainly make death less final. But how would i…